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Friday, April 20, 2007

Get on the Bus

In an effort to kill two birds with one stone, a professor at Vanderbilt University has designed a better school bus. It will still be yellow and its wheels still go round and round, but his version will be equipped with iPods and laptops which will turn wasted bus time into valuable class time.

He drew inspiration from his own childhood experience in rural Arkansas, where students must endure a 90 minute one way trip to school. Many kids in these small agrarian communities do not have the opportunity to take math and science classes in high school and may feel that college is out of their reach. Dr. Hudson wants to change all that. His new mobile classrooms will focus heavily on math and science and have been endorsed by two Nobel Laureates.

I suspect that some more cell-phone towers will need to be installed for this plan to be feasible, but I definitely like the idea behind it. It certainly makes the most of multi-tasking, although I do wonder why we can outfit a school bus with such high-tech digital technology, but find it so difficult to install seat belts.

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